French film-maker Alice Diop has curated Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation), a multipart installation involving film, artworks, readings, music and dance, opening in Paris from 21-25 October at the Palais d'Iéna. The five-day event, sponsored by Italian fashion house Miu Miu, coincides with the Art Basel fair and brings together many of the women Diop says she works with and who have helped her heal.
Diop, whose first feature film Saint Omer received the Silver Lion in Venice in 2022, said the project offered an opportunity to "bring together in one space, many of the women who work with me, who nourish me, who have helped me heal, and have together enabled this notion of consolation". The collaborators include Marie Ndiaye, with whom she writes her films, the American poet Robin Coste Lewis, Chicagoan composer Angel Bat Dawid, and historical figures such as Virginia Woolf.
A scene-by-scene approach
Diop, who has just returned to France from a two-week celebration of her work at University of California, Berkeley, said she is approaching the installation scene by scene, like a film director. "I'm not an artist, I've no desire to be an exhibition curator," she said.
The exhibition will open with a poignant image from South African artist Zanele Muholi, of a woman looking at herself naked in the mirror, and closes with Simone Leigh's sculpture Mami Wata, representing diasporic west African spirituality. Diop said of Mami Wata's towering presence: "You will be able to see her from all over the hall."
Four principal scenarios
Diop's installation will offer four principal scenarios, including a library of the texts that have most informed her work and life, where visitors are invited to read and relax. She said she reads more than she watches film, "But cinema is my language. It allows me a precision that I couldn't achieve in literature … Or maybe I make films because I'm a frustrated writer."
This is the third year Miu Miu has sponsored the exhibition, set in the Palais d'Iéna, a modernist building from the early 1940s with a 60m-long uninterrupted central hall where the house puts on its catwalk shows. The first iteration in 2024, by Polish artist Goshka Macuga, included a massive mechanical conveyor belt and a cast of about 100 actors.
Pursuing cinematic questions
In 2025, Diop contributed to Miu Miu's Women's Tales, a series of short films by female directors. Her 20-minute film, Fragments for Venus, features actor Kayije Kagame staring at paintings with black subjects in the Louvre, before the action shifts to a Brooklyn street where the gaze belongs to Séphora Pondi and the women around her.
Diop's own work in the exhibition is a split-screen video installation of archival imagery and film clips that she says have formed her own cinematic image bank. "Some of them are quite troubling, violent," she said. "In others I have found consolation."
